THE HOSTESS WITH THE MOSTEST
Not everybody hearts AMY SEDARIS (particularly reviewers of her latest film, Strangers with Candy), but we’ve been glued to the trajectory of her career ever since reading about her bizarre lifestyle in brother David’s essays. Amy’s first solo book project, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, harks back to the days when a hostess’s duties were “charmingly old-fashioned, like courtship or back-alley abortions.” Her tongue may be stapled to her cheek, but I Like You does come with practical advice and recipes -- even if some etiquette not-to-dos would make Ms. Emily Post roll over, and then projectile-vomit, in her grave. You can ask her about that and about her imaginary live-in boyfriend, Ricky, when she reads at Borders Books and Music, 10-24 School St, Boston | 5:30 pm | free | 617.557.7188, or at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge | 9:30 pm | $3 | 617.499.2012.
FACIST DREAMS
Leslie Epstein, director of the Boston University Creative Writing Program and an wonderful novelist in his own right (we lurved San Remo Drive but unforch don't have time to tell you more about the dude right now -- Google him, the answers are all on the Internets) will be reading from his latest, The Eighth Wonder of the World, at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | Free | 617.566.6660. Read Dana Kletter's Phoenix review here.